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That peculiar disease of intellectuals, that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience, that compels experience to conform to bookish expectations.

Archibald MacLeish

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Archibald MacLeish
Age: 89 †
Born: 1892
Born: May 7
Died: 1982
Died: April 20
Lawyer
Librarian
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
University Teacher
Writer
Glencoe
Illinois
Expectations
Bookish
Atheism
Compels
Disease
Infatuation
Experience
Intellectuals
Ideas
Expense
Conform
Expenses
Peculiar

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The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
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Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.
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The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defence are silent.
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There is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that was, Only there's now, and now, And the wind in the grass.
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A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off
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A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit.
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Writers . . . write to give reality to experience.
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As things are now going the peace we make, what peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace in brief.without moral purpose or human interest.
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Children know the grace of god better than most of us. They see the world the way the morning brings it back to them new and born and fresh and wonderful.
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What is more important in a library than anything else-than everything else-is the fact that it exists.
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Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.
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History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can't be heard.
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The American journey has not ended. America is always still to build ... West is a country in the mind, and so eternal.
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There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.
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See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.
Archibald MacLeish
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Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.
Archibald MacLeish
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Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question.
Archibald MacLeish
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Spring has many American faces. There are cities where it will come and go in a day and counties where it hangs around and never quite gets there. Summer is drawn blinds in Louisiana, long winds in Wyoming, shade of elms and maples in New England.
Archibald MacLeish
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The roots of the grass strain, Tighten, the earth is rigid, waits-he is waiting- And suddenly, and all at once, the rain!
Archibald MacLeish
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We are as great as our belief in human liberty - no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves.
Archibald MacLeish